Ground Party Papers - Special Edition - Fifth Sunday of June

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In this issue…

<sub>1. Special Edition?
2. The Chili Pepper Conspiracy</sub>

Special Edition? 

The Ground Party Papers go out every First and Third Sunday of the month, which typically means every other week. However, every year you’ll find two or three super-rare Fifth Sundays in a month. In 2024, those Fifth Sundays fell on March 31st and today, June 30th.

Rather than skip those Fifth Sundays, GPP will publish special editions of the newsletter — very special editions. In these editions I’ll report on the stories “they” don’t want you to know about. Don’t ask me where I get my information — I have to protect my sources.

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The Chili Pepper Conspiracy

Is there a connection between chili peppers, Roswell, and the popular YouTube show ‘Hot Ones’?

A couple months ago I was at Talking Irons Coffee Saloon, the best little coffee shop in Cochise County, enjoying my weekend lemonboy. (What’s a “lemonboy”? Lemonade with cold brew. The perfect summertime drink, believe it or not.) One table over, two gentlemen were discussing local farmer Ed Curry’s recent appearance on the popular YouTube channel ‘Hot Ones.’  Hot Ones is a celebrity interview show where the guests eat progressively spicier hot wings while doing their best to interact like a normal human.

As the two locals talked, I smiled to myself but didn’t say anything. Of course they would think it was Ed Curry who was on Hot Ones, talking about how he produced the world’s hottest chili pepper, Pepper X. Curry is a world-recognized chili grower who revolutionized the industry, the former Chairman of the International Pepper Conference, and the recent recipient of a lifetime achievement award from UofA’s College of Agriculture.

But it wasn’t Ed Curry.  It was Ed Currie.  Let me explain.

Like so many improbable stories, this one started in ‘47, just after the Roswell crash. Apparently the alphabet agencies were spooked by something they found at the crash site – or maybe it was something that showed up a few years later.  I’ve heard conflicting accounts.

Whatever the exact cause, the military’s top brass became concerned that the entire human species was facing a new threat: extraterrestrials with “psychic abilities” allowing them to hyper-coordinate their offensive actions, and to read and control the minds of other lifeforms including defenseless humans.

Three months after the Roswell incident, in September of 1947, President Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency.  Within a few years, the newly established Agency initiated a top-secret project: Extraterrestrial Defense: Capsaicin Utilization for Remote Resistance and Interconnection – shortened as E.D.C.U.R.R.I.

In their research efforts to keep humanity shielded from the psychic abilities of an aggressive extraterrestrial race, and to match the aliens’ strategically advantageous “mind-melding” capabilities, the CIA stumbled upon an interesting molecule: capsaicin — the stuff that makes chili peppers “hot.”

According to modern science, this spicy little molecule can jump start our brains, boosting synapse connections, potentiating learning and memory, and promoting mitochondrial function.  (True nerds will recall that mitochondria are the inspiration for “midichlorians” in the Star Wars universe, the intercellular organisms responsible for connecting people with “The Force.”)

But how could the Feds have understood the effects of capsaicin when our scientific understanding of the molecule is so recent?  Some say that the Feds are always decades ahead of the mainstream in their tech and science research.  Others say they had a different lead altogether.

Enter the Dresden Codex.  This ancient Mayan tome was created almost a thousand years ago and was, essentially, their culture’s Wikipedia. It contained comprehensive theories on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, religion, and history.  Of relevance to our story is the Codex’s entries on psychoactive and ceremonial plants, including chili peppers.  The Mayans, it says, used chili peppers for divination rituals and as protection from witchcraft.

A source tells me there is good evidence that the Codex was the inspiration for the CIA’s initial experiments with chili peppers and, later, capsaicin concentrates. (This source also told me that llama spit which has been boiled for 11 hours will get you higher than a weather balloon. It’s hard to know how much credence to give theories which I can’t fact-check.)

The important point is that the experiments were, I’m told, very successful.  The test subjects were able to telepathically influence others, protect themselves from psychic intrusions, and do some kind of “mind meld” with the other test subjects, allowing them to form a super-intelligent “hive mind” and carry out impossible high-coordination activities.

The Feds saw the potential for capsaicin to be the savior of mankind, a sole bastion of hope against an otherwise unassailable alien threat.  They got to work figuring out how to get more of this molecule into the general public’s bloodstream.  The first big obstacle for E.D.C.U.R.R.I. was the commercialization of chili peppers.  At that time, capsaicin content varied wildly from pepper to pepper, even in peppers of the same variety and seed stock.  This made it difficult for markets to sell the peppers.  Consumers didn’t like buying spicy peppers only to discover that they are dramatically hotter than expected or, on the other hand, without any heat at all.

The Agency couldn’t carry out chili breeding projects themselves – a bunch of scientists with lab coats and clipboards walking through thousands of acres of chili peppers in fenced-off areas is a bit conspicuous.  Instead, beginning in the 1950s, they focused on creating “super chili cultivators” who could push pepper science forward as regular members of the public.  I don’t know, and frankly don’t want to know, how they supposedly went about creating these super cultivators.  The end result was a group of men named “Ed Curry” who all became chili growers in the southwest.  As the decades wore on, some of the Curry’s dropped out of the industry, others were mysteriously “disappeared” from public knowledge, Berenstein Bears style.

Eventually one of the Curry’s hit gold.  The Ed Curry from Douglas, Arizona cracked the code on genetic stabilization of chili peppers.  This variety was named Arizona 20 and is the progenitor of roughly 90 percent of the chili peppers sold around the world today.  This was a huge win for the Extraterrestrial Defense project – but the agency had long-known that it would take much more to get sufficient levels of capsaicin moving through humanity’s collective blood-brain barrier.

Phase Two of the project began in the 1960’s.  Much like the first phase, the CIA created a “crop” of super cultivators who, this time, were meant to maximize capsaicin levels in peppers.  These cultivators were named “Ed Currie” and, once again, a singular Ed Currie rose above the rest.  His first major accomplishment was the Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world at the time.  More recently, he outdid himself with an even hotter pepper: Pepper X.

With chili peppers now sold around the world, and capsaicin levels maxed out, Project E.D.C.U.R.R.I. would seem to be in its endgame. 

Sources tell me that popular new shows like Hot Ones, Heat Seekers, and Superhot are all products of E.D.C.U.R.R.I., attempting to popularize the consumption of high-capsaicin peppers and hot sauces.

An anonymous source also forwarded documents indicating that the CIA might be continuing their “super cultivator” efforts in Mexico.  Apparently there is a young chili breeder in Oaxaca named Eduardo Correa who is developing a new strain of pepper that grows faster and requires less water than all other varieties.  Dark web conspiracy theorists refer to this new pepper as the "k’uri pepper."  K'uri is a Mesoamerican word meaning "to eat," but I haven't seen any hard any evidence that this pepper or this grower are real.

I’ve read in dark corners of the internet that more well-known intelligence projects like Project Monarch, MK Ultra, and Project 1974 are all false flags which have been “leaked” to the public as cover for the most important and secretive project in humanity’s history, the one which might save us from total alien colonization: E.D.C.U.R.R.I. 

It could all be nonsense, of course.  Many would say that the biggest conspiracy is found in the human mind itself.  We humans are susceptible to cognitive effects like apophenia, pareidolia, mondegreen, the anchoring effect, the illusory truth effect, cognitive dissonance, in-group favoritism, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and many other identified psychological tendencies which limit our ability to correctly perceive and model reality. 

Perhaps our conscious mind is at the mercy of subconscious biases and blindspots which “conspire” to make us believe things without sufficient and solid evidence. Certainly there are many people who leverage these human tendencies in order to sell books, generate ad revenue on YouTube, and even influence voter decisions.

One of the consequences of having so many deep state sources is that now I question everything, even the “alternative theories”.  You hear a convincing theory from one source, and then a contrary but equally convincing perspective from some other source.

I don’t know what to believe.  But I’m certainly investing a lot of money in the hot sauce industry.

Enjoy your Fifth Sunday!

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